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Monday, 27 February 2017

In July 2010, the United Nations General Assembly createdUN Women,the United Nations Entity for Gender
Equality and the Empowerment of Women. In doing so, UN Member States took a historic step in accelerating the Organization’s goals on gender equality and
the empowerment of women. Over many decades, the UN has made significant
progress in advancing gender equality and on every March 8th they focus on a theme to
keep on advancing towards achieving gender equality.

The theme forInternational Women’s Day, 8
March, 2017, focuses on “Women in the Changing World of Work: Planet 50-50 by
2030”. The website is, as usual, a superb source for educators but I would like
to recommend the section called"From
where I stand", a collection of stories of women around the world who
are bringing real change regarding gender equality.

I wanted to contribute to the celebration of March 8th in our classrooms
through a lesson plan based on a film. Why? I would say that sometimes the names and deeds
of the heroes in films are known to all. However, there are those films that shine the spotlight on those
whose names were known to only a few, but whose stories deserve to be told. This is the case with "Hidden figures", which tells the story of a team of African-American women mathematicians who served a vital role in NASA during the early years of the US space program.

One of these women, 98-year-old
Katherine Johnson, is a true hero who was totally hidden until this film
was released and I would like to pay my humble tribute to her and to all hidden
women whose deeds should be known to all. The starting point of the lesson I
have developed is Katherine's biography but let me suggest using the
uplifting Gospel song from the film as a warm-up:

Needless to say that we do not have to supply students with physical newspapers. We are very lucky to have online versions of most newspapers, some
of which with lesson plans that can be very helpful when you like the article
but you lack the necessary time to prepare some activities for students to
carry out while and after reading. The Guardian includes a series of free
lesson plans for different content areas. The New York Times also offers a learning section with lesson plans.

Next seminar I will present some of my favourite activities
to make the most of using newspaper and magazine articles in
the classroom but before we meet let me share some of them with
you. You can find them here.

To help students with summarizing skills and new vocabulary when reading newspaper articles, you can use this template provided by Readwritethink.

Thursday, 2 February 2017

Multicultural classrooms are a growing phenomenon as migrants flows are increasing exponentially. Classrooms now host students from diverse nationalities and cultures and teachers have toacquire new skills, competences and materials to work effectively with culturally diverse students.Multicultural Schools project is a valuable bank of resources that will help all of you who want to foster integration among different cultures and languages within your classrooms. The repository will give you free access different types of ready-to-use materials for students of both Primary and Secondary levels. The materials are available in six different languages corresponding to the partner countries taking part in the project.

I would like to suggest making students listen to and watch Marla Lewis' wonderful song and video "We all laugh in the same language" as a way to celebrate unity within diversity in our multicultural school contexts:

You can download the lyrics of the song here. Please remember that the partners who are taking part in this project need our feedback to keep on working on the project and improving it. Therefore, let me know about your classroom experience after putting some activities into practice with your students.Finally, but no less importantly, thank you very much for your immeasurable support towards cultural integration in our classrooms.